Indeed, Star Wars Supremacy, or Rebellion if you live outside of Britain. Don't ask me why it's got two names, it's one of those unanswered questions, like "Where did the universe come from?" and "Why are we here?". Yup, it's right up there with those. Anyway, back to the subject, Star Wars Supremacy (as I shall refer to it being British). Why have a chosen a game that was released way back before windows 98 was. Well, read on and you'll see…
So what is this Supremacy game you're rambling about?
Well, in short, Star Wars Supremacy is a Star Wars strategy game, but not in the form of Galactic Battlegrounds or Force Commander, Supremacy is on a much grander scale. The game has you overseeing no a single platoon, not a single city or planet, but the whole Star Wars galaxy. Playing as either the Empire or the Rebel alliance the ultimate goal of the game is to destroy the enemy's capital and capture their key personnel. How you achieve this is entirely up to you. You begin with key personnel and some randomly selected non-key personnel and planets, along with a some-how calculated starting fleet and army, and some facilities. From here you can use diplomacy to get planets or you can lead a military campaign or terror and destruction. Either way produces the same rewards and can ultimately lead to winning. Well, at this point I'd like to include some screenshots to show you how the game looks.
The main screen you'll look at most of the time. When playing as the empire the helper droids (R2 and 3PO in the screen) are different.
Here's the battle screen, you can't really make out the graphics from the picture, needless to say they aren't to great, even for when the game was released.
There's also a nice encyclopaedia which contains quite a lot of information on units, personnel etc.
Right, you've rambled on about the game what's so special about it?
Well, this game is every "pick up a game and thoughtlessly play it for a while" type person's worst nightmare. Unlike must other RTS games such as Red Alert Supremacy isn't mission based and you can win simply by building the biggest army and attacking. Sure, it'll help, but you won't win by doing it. Supremacy involves actually thinking about what you're doing and coming up with a plan and following it. Games don't last a few minutes, or a few hours, you'll find that it'll take at least several days of game play to win on a medium galaxy. The whole thing is that you may have control of one sector but you could not even have a single planet in another sector, or not even know where the enemy personnel are. Another reason most gamers would dislike this game is the graphics. I love the game, but I'd be the first to admit that the graphics could be so much better.
OK, so it's slow paced and has bad graphics, who would like this game?
Well I'd guess that's what the magazines thought. Most of the magazine reviews I read of this were pretty bad, and had I not got hold of it I would have believed them. But after playing the game I'm addicted, it's great for Star Wars fanatics and people who like to give their brain a good exercise occasionally. The multiplayer adds a whole new dimension to the game, the computer may be smart but it gets predictable, people don't, unless they're boring in which case they wouldn't even own a computer. The game never took on, although it should have done, in my opinion it's one of the best RTS games I've played, it just got bad press, which was a shame.
--
Ant991